Understanding and Improving Collaboration in Distributed Software Development

Transkript

1 Diss. ETH No Understanding and Improving Collaboration in Distributed Software Development A thesis submitted to attain the degree of DOCTOR OF SCIENCES of ETH ZURICH (Dr. sc. ETH Zurich) presented by HANS-CHRISTIAN ESTLER Master of Science, University of Paderborn, Germany Dipl.-Wirt.-Inf., University of Paderborn, Germany born on June 25th, 1983 citizen of Germany accepted on the recommendation of Prof. Dr. Bertrand Meyer, examiner Prof. Dr. Natalia Juristo, co-examiner Dr. Martin Nordio, co-examiner Prof. Dr. David Redmiles, co-examiner 2014

2 Abstract Distributed software development in which developers are located in different geographical locations is common practice in today s software industry. Teams are distributed over different countries, work in different time zones, may speak different languages and have different cultural backgrounds. All these conditions make it a challenge to collaborate effectively and efficiently in a distributed team. This thesis aims to provide new insights on how teams are affected by distribution, what the consequences are for the projects they work on, and how new techniques and tools could help to improve collaboration. The thesis investigates the impact of distribution on the communication amongst team members, showing that a substantial amount of the overall project time is spend on communication between the distributed parties of the development team. It further investigates the impact of different distribution scenarios, in particular, comparing distribution over two locations with distribution over three locations, and the role different time zone ranges have on the communication behavior of developers. The thesis also analyzes if and how the choice of development process affects distributed projects. We study metrics such as the overall success, economic savings, or motivation of the development teams, depending on the type of software development process used. For this, we use data from industry projects developed in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Our findings suggest that choice of process alone is not a critical factor to succeed in globally distributed development. Another contribution of this thesis adds to our understanding of how often developers in distributed teams are insufficiently aware of the changes performed by other team members, and how often the changes of individual developers conflict with each other. Additionally, this thesis presents novel approaches on how configuration management systems can be combined with tools to detect and prevent conflicts between individual developers changes. It also introduces a debugging technique and an integrated tool, specifically designed to support effective

3 collaboration among developers during shared debugging sessions. We discuss the design of both these tools and evaluate them in case studies, demonstrating their usefulness in collaborative development. Finally, this thesis presents an analysis on how programs are evolved over time. Knowledge on how programs are changed is instrumental when building tools that report changes to developers. In this contribution we focus on programs and languages that support contracts, a form of lightweight formal specifications, and analyze 21 contract-equipped projects written in Eiffel, C#, and Java. Our findings suggest that awareness tools, which monitor and analyze changes from developers, would benefit from adopting contracts as a language element that should be monitored.

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